Bob Leddy: Light, shadows and Stanley Kubrick

Friday

Mar 28, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Fifteen years ago this month, seminal filmmaker Stanley Kubrick passed away at his Hertfordshire, England, home at age 70. Including his then-just-completed “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrick left behind a unique...

Fifteen years ago this month, seminal filmmaker Stanley Kubrick passed away at his Hertfordshire, England, home at age 70. Including his then-just-completed “Eyes Wide Shut,” Kubrick left behind a unique collection of 13 features over the space of roughly 45 years; each film differing in plot, yet stylistically and philosophically unified. A Kubrick picture was akin to an environmental experience that was enhanced, if not outright altered, with each viewing. “One of his movies was worth 10 of someone else’s,” fellow director Martin Scorsese noted.

In looking back at Kubrick’s body of work, it should be noted that among the tools of his creativity, cinematography was key. Not surprising, since Kubrick cut his photographic teeth as a staff “shooter” for Look Magazine from 1946 to 1950. Although fresh out of high school, where he was a diffident student, Kubrick was more in his element sighting through a viewfinder. He proved himself a keenly perceptive observer of his native New York City landscape and its people, as recorded on Kodak black-and-white stock. A fascinating book, “Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows” (Phaidon Press, 2005) contains many of these Look photos.

What the images make clear is that Kubrick appreciated, and therefore mastered, the concepts of lighting which carried over to his earliest motion pictures. What’s more, in his later masterpieces, the expatriate Kubrick sought out and worked collaboratively with some of Great Britain’s top cameramen: Gil Taylor (“Dr. Strangelove”); Oswald Morris (“Lolita‘’); Geoffrey Unsworth (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) — and especially John Alcott, with whom Kubrick made three of his most memorable films (“A Clockwork Orange,” “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining”).

Kubrick’s second directorial effort, “Killer’s Kiss” (1955), best exemplifies his command of chiaroscuro (i.e. “film noir”) lighting; a visual device prevalent in the post-war B-picture crime dramas to which Kubrick was exposed. “Killer’s Kiss” was decidedly a director’s work-in-progress. Kubrick shot it with money borrowed from an uncle, and the picture featured a cast of mostly non-professional actors. The main exception was noted Jamaican-born actor Frank Silvera (who two years earlier had appeared in Kubrick’s debut feature, “Fear and Desire”).

If “Killer’s Kiss” has an eerily detached quality, it’s because Kubrick post-dubbed all dialogue and sound effects. Visually, however, “Killer’s Kiss” is a film-class exercise in the use of noir lighting. Besides writing, producing, casting, editing and directing the picture, the 26 year-old Kubrick was also its cinematographer.

There is much to like in this movie, such as the astonishing — and violent — climax in a mannequin factory. But for me, the scenes with Silvera are particularly striking. The actor plays Vince Rapallo, an oleaginous, cigar-chomping gangster/night club owner with an unhealthy appetite for one of his dance hall girls.

In textbook aesthetics of film noir, Silvera’s florid, sweaty features are often illuminated by a “baby spot” from below, or by shafts of diffused lighting through Venetian blinds, cigar smoke curling around him. Likewise, the back-alley scene in which a man is killed by a pair of Rapallo’s thugs (set to composer Gerald Fried’s kinetic Latin-flavored score) is meticulously lit by Kubrick. Looming shadows and dark corners take on lives of their own and seemingly become complicit in the crime, a hallmark of film noir.

“There are no postcard shots in this picture,” Kubrick said. “I wanted to film the smell, the feel and color of the city.”

From adolescence, Kubrick was wed to a camera, either the still or motion picture variety. Indeed, among his singular qualities as an artist, he was one of the few great directors who thoroughly grasped what made that wondrous invention tick.

Bob Leddy

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